Plans published for Large Hadron Collider's dark matter-hunting successor

We haven't even seen the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at its full
capacity yet, but plans for its successor -- the International Linear
Collider (ILC) -- have been finalised.

The main goal is finding dark matter, the substance that is
theorised to make up more than 85 percent of the universe's mass but which has never
been directly detected. It won't be a replacement for the LHC, but
rather is designed to be "complementary".

This is because the ILC, unlike the circular proton-colliding
LHC, will be a 31km-long straight line that smashes electrons and
positrons together. While the LHC found what is now believed to be
the famous Higgs Boson, the ILC is needed to actually explore the
properties of that particle, including its mass and the precise
strength of its interactions with other elements.

The Technical
Design Report for the ILC, published today by an international
group of scientists, lays out the technical design for the collider
and how it could be implemented, including risk and cost
strategies. At an estimated price of $7.8b (£5b), it isn't cheap --
and it would be twice as expensive as the LHC was.

The director of the ILC's global design effort, particle
physicist Barry Barish, said: "The Technical Design Report basically says
that we are ready to go ahead. The technology is there, the R&D
milestones have been achieved, the physics case is clear, and we
could start construction tomorrow. All we need is a clear political
statement, and there are strong signs from Japan that it could bid
to host the project."

However, despite interest from Japan, there is no funding
allocated by any national or international organisation -- and it's
hard to convince cash-strapped governments to invest in a new
particle physics experiment like this when it seems like the last
one only just got started.

The LHC is currently being upgraded to run close to its maximum energy level of 14TeV
from 2015. While this is much higher than the proposed maximum of
1TeV for the ILC, the ILC's design is meant to allow more precise
measurements of the particles it will be searching for than at the
LHC.